Immigration and migration must be
stopped, according to Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump.

He believes keeping America’s doors
open to Muslims from the Middle
East or to Latinos from Mexico and
Central America will have dangerous
consequences for the United States.

At the recent Republican National
Convention, where I served as a faculty
leader for The Washington Center’s
two-week academic seminar, I spoke
to people about what immigration and
migration mean in an era in which “the
other” often is viewed as dangerous, ill-mannered, or inferior to the majority.

The opinions can be summarized in
one of three ways:

1. We’re in an unprecedented
international situation. America
must control who enters the country
until ISIS and other terrorist
organizations are in check;

2. America doesn’t have an
immigration problem; it has an
illegal immigration problem. Until
the president and Congress commit

ANTHONY MORETTI (Ohio University) is the director of the Center for Innovative Teaching and Directed Engaged
Learning at Robert Morris University, where he also is an associate professor in the Department of Communication. He earned
his Ph.D. in communication from the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio, his master’s in journalism at The Ohio State
University, and his bachelor’s in sports information from the University of Southern California.

themselves to doing something,
nothing will change;

3. The Republican Party has forgotten
its humanity; it needs to project a
more humanitarian-like image to the
millions of people around the world
fleeing domestic crises.

But there’s a different side to
migration that people in higher
education know quite well: faculty
moving from one institution to
another, which can mean moving to a
different part of the home country or
to another one; or students continuing
their academic journey at an institution
located outside their home country.

Benton, Gonzalez-Jurado, and
Beneit-Montesinos’ (2013) recent
overview of the literature relating
to the migration of nursing faculty
offers important details about
faculty movement in general. They

ACADEMIAON THE MOVE

report a variety of factors contribute
to faculty seeking employment
elsewhere: salary, job satisfaction,
upward mobility, peer relationships,
and family ties. Subsequent studies
hinted at the faculty members’ interest
in internationalizing curricula and
attracting top-level students from
all over the world as contributing to
seeking employment elsewhere. They
also note that previous research finds
that faculty who leave their home
country rarely return in a
professional capacity.

Some of these reasons also were
evident in Tremblay, Hardwick, and
O’Neill’s (2014) review of why U.S.
and Canadian geography faculty opted
for positions in each other’s country.

Factors relating to environment/
lifestyle, political policies in their home
nation, weather, and the ease of travel
across the border weighed heavily in
the decisions to migrate.

Of course, sometimes leaving
one place — be it a university or a
country — for another is not possible.

Fogarty and Black (2015) note that
the movement of senior faculty in
accounting programs has declined over
time. Among the reasons they suggest
for this stagnation is that more and
more schools are comfortable hiring
adjuncts to teach; thus, an opportunity
at another university for an experienced
instructor is blunted by that school’s
economic needs or preferences.